Sherman Alexie: Comedy Is Simply a Funny Way of Being Serious (Terence Winch)

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After making my living for many years as a musician and free-lance writer/editor, I got a job with the Smithsonian in 1985, spending the last 17 years (until retiring on 30 April) at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. It was definitely exciting to have had a role in bringing this museum to life, especially during the era leading to the opening of the new building on the National Mall in 2004. It’s a unique place—not without its problems and deficiencies, of course—that everyone should check out when visiting DC. 

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Though I did not become an expert in Native literature, over the years I became familiar with some of the Indian world’s leading writers. Kiowa novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday, who won a Pulitzer in 1969 for House Made of Dawn, was a not infrequent visitor to the museum. Our excellent Native Writers Series brought many other luminaries to the museum, including Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor, Luci Tapahonso, songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, Susan Power, and the incomparable and alluring Louise Erdrich. Among my personal favorites were two young poets—M.L. Smoker and Sherwin Bitsui, rising stars in the Native literary firmament. In 2007, I coproduced a CD of contemporary Native writers for the museum called Pulling Down the Clouds, which I believe is the only such recording out there.  My favorite piece from the CD is “How To Make Good Baked Salmon from the River” by Nora Marks Dauenhauen [Download How To Make Good Baked Salmon]. And I don’t even eat seafood.

But today I want to shine the spotlight on Sherman Alexie (left).  Not that he needs the attention—Sherman has been the most famous Native writer in the land for years now. If you caught his poem in the New Yorker a few weeks ago (“Survivorman”; June 8 & 15, 2009), you got a taste of his recent work: formal, yet colloquial; funny, yet profound.  This brilliance pervades almost everything in Face, his new book of poems (disclosure: published by Hanging Loose Press, which has also published my last two books). The extraordinary technical virtuosity in the service of Alexie’s sometimes raw honesty and often hilarious self-exposure is the synthesis that makes this book so impressive.

Let me backpedal for a moment.  In his 1987 introduction to Harper’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century Native American Poetry, Brian Swann writes, “The Native American poet seems to work from a sense of social responsibility to the group as much as from an intense individuality.”  While Sherman's Native identity—a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene tribal member, he was born and raised on the rez—is never far from the foreground, and provides him with a rich source of subject matter, his writing is not shaped by “a sense of social responsibility.” It seems to me that his primary motive is to write really good poems, and if they are also funny, so much the better. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that the work of many Indian writers suffers because of this perceived requirement to speak for the group (but I know that sense of communal responsibility is a very powerful force in the Native universe). 

Back to Face. Villanelles. Poems with footnotes, which themselves have footnotes.  Poems shape-shifting into prose and back again. The personal, political, sexual, physical, spiritual, historical, racial—you get it all in this one amazing book. Some poems, some attitudes, will be irritating to readers, Indian and non.  But the energy, velocity, and creative abundance in this book (qualities that also mark his stunning young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a National Book Award winner) are to be prized. Sherman inhales the inappropriate air of genius and exhales all of these unauthorized poems, right in our face.